how to feel better in 10 minutes a day...

Over and over, I say to the people who come to me for help: The best thing you can do to make your life better is to meditate. 
Over and over, they say back to me: My mind won't stay still long enough to meditate. 
Over and over, I say to back to them: No, it won't, will it? Not till you've practiced meditation for a while! 

So many of us think a calm mind is the normal human state of being and a mind that chatters away at us every waking moment is abnormal. Somehow we think that most other people have it together and we are the only ones whose minds are giving us grief all day every day.

I'm afraid not. It's the nature of the mind to think. That's what it's there for. The mind exists to look for problems and when it finds them, real or imaginary, to turn  possible solutions over and over until it finds one it's happy with. Stupid Mind doesn't care if it's the middle of night. It doesn't care if its solutions are actually helpful. It doesn't care that it's actually only a tool for us to use in order to have a happy life.

The Mind thinks very highly of itself. It thinks it's in charge of our lives. The Mind thinks it's in charge of us. In fact, the Mind thinks it IS us.

It isn't.

It's certainly an important part of us - but many people consider our mind, our thoughts, to be our core Self.

It's not.

Think about a time where you felt peaceful - maybe it was lying on the beach in the middle of your best holiday ever and all you were aware of was the sun on your face and the smell of the sea in your nostrils. Maybe it was climbing a tree when you were a kid and your whole concentration was tied up in where to find your next foothold.  Maybe it was lying in your lover's arms after some mind-blowing sex and all you were aware of was the after-light of the fireworks behind your eyelids.

These experiences generally do not need the words or thoughts that Mind uses to communicate with us - and yet these are the times when we are most our true selves.

The mind is important. In no way am I saying it isn't. It's fun to play with. It's interesting to explore. It's crucial to navigate successfully through life's problems. But it isn't our most essential self. If humans were computers the mind would pretty much be the operating system. Like Windows, with all its problems and glitches. Just as Windows runs the computer, but is not actually the computer, so the mind runs the self, but isn't actually the Self.

I see my job as helping people find their way in a scary world - and the number 1 way to navigate this world is by putting the mind in its place. What we think of as our mind is often more just a constant stream of worrying and negativity. What will happen if I run out of money? What will happen if my lover leaves me? What will happen to me when I'm old?

What's the point of these out of control thoughts? There is none. They don't solve anything. They just make you unhappy. Meditation will teach you to quiet your mind so that you can enjoy the beautiful things in life. It will allow you to control when you let your mind off the leash to apply its logic to actual life problems in the here and now.

There are operations you leave Windows to run automatically on your computer and things that need your direction. Your life is like that. Practising meditation allows us to quiet those unnecessary thoughts and experience what lies beneath them.

What will we find beneath the constant chatter of an out of control mind?

Peace.

In my next entry, I'll give you some pointers on how to get started on the great adventure inward that we call meditation.

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magical duet

Some things just lift your spirits whether you like bluegrass music or not. If you don't love the sound of banjo in the morning, go straight to 1:32 to see something that you have to smile about. 

I love bluegrass and I love flannel shirts and I love dorky looking rangas with crooked smiles. All this goes together to make me think Josh Williams is a bit cute. 

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what tarot reading MIGHT be...

Last entry, I told you some of the things I think tarot isn't.

So I'm sure you've been waiting ever since with bated breath for me to come back and tell you exactly what it is. No? Well, okay - I'll tell you anyway.

Tarot is a guide on how to best proceed in your life from your present position to get to where you need to be in order to discover or fulfil your life's purpose. Tarot, at its best and most useful, is a tool for revealing the things you need to know about yourself and your situation to make the right decisions for your future.

This is not to say a tarot reading doesn't come up with some pretty amazingly accurate predictions of the future. It does. It can also be very good at identifying what's going on now in your life - but your future is much less clear. I can tell you what the cards say you should do in any given circumstances - but you can walk out the door of my salon and do whatever you like, no matter what advice the cards may have given you. The future is not written in stone. You hold the power to make the best or the worst of any situation in your own hands. Don't try to give it away to me - I don't want it!

Many times, people will come to a tarot reader hoping for confirmation of an opinion they already hold. For instance, a woman once asked me whether she should begin an affair with a man she worked with. She was married and she loved her husband but the chemistry with her workmate was so strong, she didn't know how she could stand it if they didn't consummate their relationship.

I told her that I wasn't there to tell her what she should or shouldn't do and that she would have to make her own decisions based on her own ethics. But I was able to offer her some advice from the tarot; it was clear - the cards I laid down after shuffling were among the worst in the pack. An affair would be a disaster that would adversely affect her work and her marriage, quite possibly to the point of losing both. But her position was that she loved this man and still felt that she had to find out if her happiness lay with him.

Well, whoopsie! Her happiness, your happiness, my happiness, the milkman's happiness lies within that individual's own self and it can't be found by chasing stuff outside of that self. I don't doubt the woman might have had great sex with her colleague but great sex is not happiness; it's great sex and that's all it is. Fleeting and often very very messy in more than one sense of the word and rarely worth what it would have cost her in the long run.

I don't know exactly what happened in this particular case but the client returned to see me a couple of years later and she was no longer married nor was she with her work colleague. I didn't pry. I just laid out the cards again for her and read what was in them.


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